I understand the difference, I just don’t know that there actually is a formal establishment of warnings in the law. I await the end of your vacation so you can cite whatever statute your state has set up for warnings, but my Google-fu isn’t bringing up state statutes establishing a formal warning system. Given the nature of them as discretionary, I would imagine they’d be awkward laws to write.
They also have the same effect on a driving record as a verbal warning, which is they aren’t posted. But it’s a tool that helps people assess their driving habits more so than a verbal warning (until they throw it in the trash, of course).
Some of our squads have a printer hooked up to the mobile data terminal that automatically prints out a cite. But mine doesn’t. I have to write by hand so if it’s a warning I’m not going to spend the time and energy writing it out when I can just do it verbally.
The funny part is that the section of road I got the warning on is probably the safest place to go really fast. It is the on-ramp interchange section for a highway project that never got built. So it is basically three miles of straight, limited access, highway with excellent visibility (with the possible exception of where that trooper was sitting, but in my defense I thought it was someone parked to go fishing in the nearby lake) and the lowest speed limit of any of the surrounding divided highway. But yes, I housebreak easily.
I’ve gotten written warnings on what looked exactly like a regular citation print-out, one hand-written on what looked like the sort of “traffic book” that might come with a Halloween cop costume, and even one in postcard form that I was supposed to fix the issue I was being warned about (a broken taillight,) find a police officer to witness that it was corrected, and mail back to the officer in question. All of these in the same city. That’s what’s lead me to believe that (at least in my town) there’s no legal framework for a traffic warning, and that a cop forcing a litterer to pick up all the trash on a section of sidewalk rather than citing him, or dressing down a jaywalker, is doing just the same as a cop handing out a written traffic warning.